Month: July 2009

Dad said:
Put yer teeth in. Taking you out for whores and pizza.
Had a great day at the institution. ‘Monocle’ Joe Chamberlain and me rolled the rich delivery kid in the narrow wasteland between
Receiving and
expectation.
That kid fell and turned into outward and innard like he was swallowing his own ass but we left him some change for the bus for the inconvenience. Reminded me of your mother that time in Sparks, with the alkali dust in her hair and the pattern from the lawn chair on her cheek and just a little.. well I wouldn’t say drool exactly.
That kid blew out his pants and lost one sneaker in a high parabolic arc they used to be Chuck E Taylors or Keds when I was a boy now I don’t know what but I do know it hasn’t come down yet. He had two eyes up one one side of his head like a flatfish pasted on Joe’s one big magnified eye and they locked into something deep there in that narrow wasteland and I thought for an instant Joe might turn against me
I had to promise him a night of whores and pizza but when he seemed satisfied I flicked his right kidney out with that little Nevada souvenier spoon your mother left me, you know the one, the only one that works good on grapefruit. He looked disappointed but I said Steady Monocle Joe you still got one good kidney and he say No, hell Lester you always forget I gave that to your wife when she run off with me that time, and down he goes right in the poor kid’s pizza.

This week there was another message on the machine: My own parents dead in the front seat of the Lincoln with the suicide doors and the top down, that was the fantasty that amused me along the I-40 corridor. Heads not moving, except maybe shrinking slightly, as the miles flew by. My mother’s chemical hair in the wind. Don’t pick up any eyes in the rear view- ruins it. How many 1963 Lincoln Continentals sold as a result of Kennedy? You sit in the backseat as a kid and you watch this sort of mass produced american monument slip into domestic disrepair. The stink of cornchips, fido, cigarette smoke. This is what Americans families do. Supplant institutions with the clamor of accessories. AM radio with that landscape, fries with that shake. There is another sour peripheral gasp you can’t place because of your youth and innocence but you can still somehow say to yourself So this is what it all leads to. You see the age in the back of your parents heads, in the car, or on the couch watching Show of Shows, shrunken, composting, floating in the tremens of your budding dementia. But the voices were lenient. I was able to dabble in psychosis via fingerpaints and small animals. [laughs] What do they call a machine that consumes and produces nothing? A reverse perpetual motion machine that absorbs all energy and never budges? Maybe I’m not making myself clear. We should focus on the hole. A man and a woman together with this kind of ambition produce a certain hole. But -and I mean this- only my hole seems natural. I obsess about voids. I’m spending a lot of time at the library, researching my own epic hole-ness. Holesome- this is me. I’ll research, do all the legwork. But it’s your job, Wim, to make the end result something I can live with.